I find myself opening a shell and typing "man ascii" more than I would like. More recently, I've found myself looking (with no success) for a equivalent web page that isn't ugly -- sometimes a browser tab is just more convenient.

Yesterday, I decided to stop searching and just write one myself: man ascii. (I was a bit surprised that this domain, and all the variants of it Joker came up with, were available!) I think it gives me everything I got out of ascii(7), but I would love any bug reports.

This is mostly for my own reference, because the thing in the manual didn't work for me and it took too much googling. I just wanted these steps listed in order.

1. debootstrap --variant=buildd --arch i386 --foreign sid base-i386
2. chroot base-i386 /debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage
3. vi base-i386/etc/apt/sources.list (there must be some way to do this exactly like pbuilder --create?)
4. (cd base-i386 && tar vczf /var/cache/pbuilder/base-i386.tgz .)
5. pbuilder --update --basetgz /var/cache/pbuilder/base-i386.tgz

I'm not sure if this is quite right, as I did end up tidying up both amd64 and i386 by hand at some point. But it's functional.

Russel notes a discussion of the problems with embedded media. I've been using a Greasemonkey script for a while to linkify EMBED tags for easier non-embedded downloading, but this doesn't help much on Flash sites such as YouTube. I haven’t installed Flash in years, but I got sick of slinging URLs around and/or giving up and being the unpopular kid, so I took some other Greasemonkey code I was hacking on and mushed it all together:

http://www.red-bean.com/~decklin/userscripts/unembedtube.user.js

(I get a perverse sort of nostalgia out of bringing back the "puzzle piece" for links, and mocking people with it.) YouTube embeds will appear to work like any other, but the URL is changed from the Flash wrapper to the FLV file, which can be opened in MPlayer/Totem/whatever. Since we can figure out this URL, it is also, of course, possible to make such the link back into an embed usable by mplayer-mozilla or a similar plugin.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to look up how to add a configuration menu, but this line of JS does have a certain charm to it:

var evil = 0; // need to make this user-settable

You know what to do. If you want true evil, there are some pointers in the comments. For YouTube videos embedded from other sites, the best I can kludge for now is link to the video's original YouTube page. If someone would like to write a routine to snarf that page with XMLHTTPRequest and yank the necessary arguments out, I would love to add it.

(Insert five-page “think piece” here about the lost dream of MIME and the sad fact that the rise of “Web 2.0” has been driven more by the fact that native installation is irreparably broken and pointless anyway on most PCs than it is by the fact that JavaScript actually works now and the implications of this for the Free Software movement especially in light of the fact that we are still human beings who occasionally do social things like sign up for Twitter even though they're running on some proprietary code base.)

I just wasted half an hour (mostly finding a dead motherboard and bending wire) making one of these:

I then threw out the cap to my USB storage device. Why doesn’t anybody sell them? Why are the holes for your keyring always on the part you use (thus weighing it down, particularly if it's sticking out of the front of a tower) and not the part that comes off? It's not easy to unplug by accident (I did squeeze it a bit removing some of the metal).

I think I’m just not looking in the right place. I can’t be the first person to have been annoyed with this. Lazyweb, please tell me where to go.

(Yes, the only thing I use it for is my SSH key.)

I miss the Left Foot Living Review.

Here’s a great bit from this month’s Crypto-Gram:

Those who calculate chances may perhaps find that not one death (or the destruction of one house) in a hundred thousand happens from that cause, and that therefore it is scarce worth while to be at any expense to guard against it. But in all countries there are particular situations of buildings more exposed than others to such accidents, and there are minds so strongly impressed with the apprehension of them, as to be very unhappy every time a little thunder is within their hearing; it may therefore be well to render this little piece of new knowledge as general and well understood as possible, since to make us safe is not all its advantage, it is some to make us easy. And as the stroke it secures us from might have chanced perhaps but once in our lives, while it may relieve us a hundred times from those painful apprehensions, the latter may possibly on the whole contribute more to the happiness of mankind than the former.

—Benjamin Franklin, on his invention of the lightning rod

Isn’t it crazy how people wrote back then? I think I could have gotten along well with it.

Tip of the day:

.toolbar-primary > toolbarbutton .toolbarbutton-icon {
    padding: 5px !important;
}

More target-acquisition space, no distracting labels. People who write extensions tend to make their labels ridiculous.

You know how every once in a while you get some moron trolling for unsecured accounts over SSH and your logs get spammed with “invalid user” for every single username in their dictionary?

I finally figured out what to do about it. They tend to have their own SSH port open. So as soon as anyone tries to log in with an invalid username, I just NAT all further connection attempts back to them. tail -f + a few lines of shell = Ahhhhhhh. Mine is an evil laugh.